Armor

[Invictus]

Sorry I'm new here and don't see a search feature.

 

Question on armor,  Deck armor is for plunging fire and belt is for closer incoming fire.  Is there a set range me to worry and belt vs deck armor?   My reason for asking is I was in a battle where I was 3km from a ship (5" guns I think) and I was taking penning damage in the "mid deck".

 

Side question does fires effect structure?  I had a ship bow to stern on fire and no structure %% was going down.

 

Thx

 

[Accipiter]

when you need to start worrying about plunging fire depends on a lot of things such as how much deck armor you have but also the calibre, weight and ballistics of the attacking shell. as a  rule of thumb though, under 10km of range, plunging fire penetrating from above is typically not a thing. long range plunging penetrations started being a thing in late WW1 and afterwards only. before that guns just wheren't accurate enough at those ranges and fleet engagements happened closer anyway.

your Mid-Deck penetration was just a shell that hit the side of your ship above the belt and penetrated sideways. the armored belt of a ship doesnt extend very high above the waterline, it's only there to protect machinery and magazine rooms that are at or below the waterline in the hull. most of the side of the ship above the waterline isn't protected by it. this upper part of the hull that isn't protected by the belt is generally called the "casemate" in naval terminology. it generally has a bit of armor of its own, but much less than the belt, typically just enough armor to protect against HE shells, not AP. you can't set your Casemate armor currently in the ship designer, but its is planned to be added, eventually.

fire does not affect the superstructure (as in: the conning towers, gun turrets, ect) directly. they affect only the main hull compartiments, although a penetrating hit on a gun turret or a torpedo tube CAN start a fire on nearby hull compartiments, but if the weapon wasn't destroyed by the hit, it won't burn down at all, and hull fire will never propagate to guns/torpedoes and destroy them either.

if a ship has almost all (like, more than 80%) of its hull compartiments on fire at the same time, then the game insta-kill it regardless of how much structure% or floatability% it has left. then the game then gives you the message "X ship sinks due to heavy fire". it happens only pretty rarely. otherwise, fire slowly burns down the HP of any compartiments that are burning and can spread to nearby compartiments. if a Red compartiment (with Zero HP left) is on fire, then nothing happens, although that fire cans till spread if not put out, and reach a green or yellow compartiment eventually.

one last thing i noticed, though i'm not 100% sure, is that it seems fire that spread to the macinery room compartiments down in the middle of the hull, however, CAN disable the engine of the ship i think, if it burns down to red.